Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
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Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#2I have a hack that makes this somewhat simpler — hook into people's online grocery shopping. Then, all the stuff you eat at home can be counted automatically. Obviously, it doesn't work so well if you throw food away (so you have to tell the app that, or allow for a small amount of wastage) or share food (so you have to say how many people live in the household and their consumption profiles), but the data is available now.
Also, you don't need to measure exercise to help with weight-loss; instead just work out how many calories the user is eating and then encourage them to restrict that until they start losing weight (basically we are building an eat-watch à la the hacker diet.)
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#3I am pretty sure I have seen an app that does food recognition already. Not sure if it was for iPhone, or traditional desktop.
The one sad aspect of this idea is that in theory, humans should be able to determine their needs without external monitoring devices - certainly when it comes to food.
Perhaps instead of an external device, it would be better to invest in some self awareness? I realize, though, that it is not possible for everybody, in fact, I also don't know a good way to learn it.
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#4Health data could be a powerful next data layer, perhaps as location has become. There are some devices and apps in the space, but I haven't seen anything yet that focuses on _publishing_ the data, as Foursquare focuses on publishing location and tips and I think Adams has it right... it's got to be easy (and fun) or people will just give up.
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#5Ideally restaurants would upload the nutrition facts of their foods to an online database. (Maybe this should be legally required.)
Such a database would make this app more feasible, as the smart phone could use GPS to figure out what restaurant it is in. Maybe even better would be a numerical code next to each food item on the menu that could be input into a smart phone to provide full nutrition facts. That seems like more of an inevitability than a general picture scanner, offering superior ease of use and, let's face it, technical feasibility.
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#6Health data could be a powerful next data layer, perhaps as location has become. There are some devices and apps in the space, but I haven't seen anything yet that focuses on _publishing_ the data, as Foursquare focuses on publishing location and tips and I think Adams has it right... it's got to be easy (and fun) or people will just give up.
Your figure publishes the data well enough.
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#7This is a bit impractical.
Recognizing the food with few errors would be horribly hard. I think it is sometinhg like speech recognition or automatic translation: yes, it is easy to create some simple not very good speech recognizer or translator software, but it is incredibly hard to create a high quality one.
The only remaining option is to create a user interface where the user can type-in his daily food intake very easily/intuitively. Maybe most users would want to do this on their computer's screen and not on a phone.
Of course there are plenty of calory-tracker, 'diet organizer' software on the market like http://www.dietorganizer.com/. But I am not an expert in this market.
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#8>If it seems impossible that an app could recognize food types, consider that software can already recognize faces, voices, specific songs, and fingerprints. Recognizing broccoli can’t be that much harder.
Assuming "broccoli" is a stand-in for "arbitrary food", that's one of the most wrong things I've ever seen Scott Adams say. Vision is a really hard problem, and there's far more variance in the appearance of food than there is in those of faces or fingerprints. (Recognizing songs is a non-sequitur.)
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#9This takes "feature X shouldn't be too hard to implement" to a whole new level: "Recognizing broccoli can’t be that much harder."
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#10I am pretty sure I have seen an app that does food recognition already. Not sure if it was for iPhone, or traditional desktop. The one sad aspect of this idea is that in theory, humans should be able to determine their needs without external monitoring devices - certainly when it comes to food. Perhaps instead of an external device, it would be better to invest in some self awareness? I realize, though, that it is no…
Most humans are capable of eating healthy. As most humans are capable of recognizing faces. But not all.